Playing With Matches

by Carolyn Wall

  I heard my name called, over and over, in pleadings and screams, Clea becoming six syllables, then ten.

  Toward morning someone picked me up, coated with ash and snot and filth.

  The air was gray, the field burnt; the house was rubble. Through the dark haze of a bad fairy tale, the only light shining was an occasional glimpse of the Farm’s razor wire. There was no Mama’s house now, to block the view.

  I tried to make out the guard turrets, the big brick house with its torturous dungeons—the place where, in short order, I would be going.

  Through the long hours of that day, Auntie rocked me. I was too long in the leg but scared beyond caring. Uncle brought tea and made me sip, though I wouldn’t raise my head from Auntie’s shoulder, where her dress had grown soggy from my tears. The tea only caused me to choke and cry more. Auntie told him to come with wet washcloths, and they tried to clean my arms and legs, but I clung to her with my fists and my knees. My hair stuck to me, and I wet myself and Auntie too. By the time they got me into a clean nightgown, my tears had made ashy stains on everything.

  Instead of her usual lumbering around with a face full of muffin, Bitsy sat in a chair, and Miss Shookie moved about with a strange quietness. Neighbors came, even the younger Mr. Oatys, who acted like they’d never in their lives kept a boy under their house.

  The ladies of the church stopped in, the ones who had hated my mama so hard on the Fourth and called her names and wouldn’t speak to their husbands. Before long, the sheriff came too—he’d been over at the fire—looking sad and sorry that he had to ask questions. I could answer none of them. The horrid and flabby Miss Pilcher arrived in her green county station wagon, and with her was the hated Millicent Poole. She’d been on the telephone and among the neighbors, making calls and fanning flames. Like everybody else, she had first been next door to stand and cluck over the smoking embers, and now they all tracked in the sticky ash.

  I was very afraid and had no one to whom I could confess my fears. I recalled how Miss Pilcher had taken Wheezer away. She had a high nasal whine, like an animal call. Miss Shookie called her a harpy and turned her back on her. Miss Pilcher shook a sheaf of papers and then her pencil and finally her fist, but Auntie kept her arms tight around me. In the end, Miss Pilcher said, “I’ll be back, and then, by God, I’ll have a court order.”

  Auntie shot back, “And I’ll have a lawyer by suppertime. I’m responsible for the girl—you go tend to more important things.”

  But I wondered if there was anything more important.

  The mood in our house stayed dismal and gray.

  The most unfathomable thing was—Miss Izzie Thorne took time from school and came to be with us. We held a wake for my end, for the death of me. They sat on the sofa with me wedged between the skinny Miss Thorne and my rotund aunt. They sipped their coffee, and although I could not drink, I was given coffee that was mostly milk. Auntie said I had the tremors bad enough. Even in my misery, I could not take my eyes from Miss Thorne, her broomstick legs with their cotton stockings, her flat-heeled shoes, and what Auntie called a Marcel wave. This woman, who had corrected and chastised me in the classroom, sat daily now, looking like she wanted to say something but wasn’t sure what.

  Uncle stayed over in one of the two rooms on the second floor. Miss Shookie did too. I think she was afraid some big thing would happen, and she might miss it. Or maybe she was just there in case Auntie needed her.

  But Uncle’s presence was for me. He sat in the chair by the window and oversaw the road, announced any comings, and helped Auntie and Miss Shookie in the kitchen. He peeled carrots and onions that made him cry. At the table, Uncle’s small antics had once sent me into peals of laughter. Now, when Miss Shookie called us to dinner, I begged off. But I was not excused. To please them, I took up my knife and fork and cut my roast beef or a wedge of melon into tiny pieces. I could not eat. When the conversation turned frightening, which was most of the time, Uncle laid his hand, palm up, on the table, and I slid my smaller one into his. Right-handed Uncle—who, because of Claudie Maytubby, had once eaten his supper with his fingers—now ate with his left. For my benefit.

  He did not sleep well; none of us did. Nightly, Auntie checked the locks on the doors—a thing I had never seen her do before. Uncle walked the hall below me, then down the stairs to the kitchen, where I heard the toilet flush and water run.

  One week later, a volunteer fireman ducked in apologetically and said they were still over there, patrolling and checking, beating down hot spots. Twice, a pumper truck came out and those men hooked up their hoses and sprayed things down, kept the earth damp and sparks from starting up grass fires.

  If there didn’t come a rain, they said, and this wind kept up, they expected bad things to happen not only here and in the weeds next door but also for the neighbors, and in the prison gardens and as far as the hog farm. Auntie took them into the kitchen, talking softly but long and hard, and crying some, and therein my heart ached. Not for me, or for the old house across the way, but for what Auntie was feeling, and my great fear that it might separate us. But Auntie had said that both she and Miss Izzie Thorne had once made a brave stand, and maybe now they would keep me safe from harm.

  I didn’t know what she meant.

  The greater question, one that plagued me like a worsening case of flu, was whether I deserved to be safe from harm. In her entire life, my mama never stood up for a single thing, and I’d hated her in ways no words can describe.

  For the county workers and other visitors, Auntie made thick pork-roast sandwiches that they ate at our table. Their faces, full of pity and concern, sucked the breath right out of me. Auntie directed me to cut slices of cake and refill the tea glasses. She brooked no backtalk, and I did as I was told. But, oh, my soul—those days were almost intolerable. The kitchen was full of a heavy purple sadness, though nobody but me seemed to have trouble breathing.

  At night something cold wrapped around my heart. My eyes refused to close. During the days, my mouth was dry and glued shut. My soul was black as tar.

  Reverend Ollie Green, whose books I’d once borrowed, came to visit. He lifted me up and set me on the sofa, and told me God loved me, but I knew he was lying. God loved the Reverend because he was good. God loved Auntie because she fed sandwiches to His flock. And He loved Uncle Cunny Gholar because, with Uncle’s fine humor and his pencil-thin mustache, everybody did.

  Neighbors and folks who knew Auntie, and had heard of our troubles, drove from as far away as Jackson and Hattiesburg and Slidell, Louisiana. They whispered gossip with Miss Shookie and ignored Miss Pilcher’s green station wagon in the yard and her presence in our house. They unloaded angel food cakes and green-onion salads and crisp-browned casseroles. Some sat in our parlor with their Bibles and prayed.

  Auntie kept the lights turned low. My hands and feet were freezing, and my backbone shook. While Auntie made endless pots of coffee and sliced loaves of the neighbors’ pumpkin bread, Miss Pilcher sprang a half-dozen more visitations on us. Every time, she came armed with a clipboard, a sour face, a camera, and a fresh white glove.

  Finally, folks were thinning out. In ones and twos, they drifted away, closing the screen door gently. Millicent Poole, though, stayed on. Every day she was the first to arrive and the last to leave. She had long crooked fingers that kept reaching and plucking at dust motes and lint, and she looked like she wanted to get me alone. She told Auntie, in her rusty voice, that I was overrun with Satan’s demons, and less than a candidate for foster care. I’d be placed in a home for miscreants, for schizophrenics and delinquents—and then prison would be the best thing for me.

  Otherwise, she said, I’d turn out just like—that knobby finger turned to the kitchen window, through which we could see the heap of charred scrap—my mother.

  Auntie said that was not possible, that I was Jerusha Lovemore’s daughter.

  But a dozen things in the room said otherwise.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jerusha,” Mi
llicent Poole said one evening while she drank up our tea and scratched at her arms with her long brittle nails. “You’re as blind as you are ugly negroid.”

  Auntie dumped me on the floor and turned on the enemy. “And you, Millie Poole, are a hateful white woman in a colored church. You got no business in False River, no kindness to extend. You got no love, no joy, no thanks, no sex. Get on, now, outa my house and away from my girl.”

  Auntie’s words should have flowed like syrup and settled around my aching heart. They did not. I watched the two of them, nose to nose, and wondered why Auntie did not remind Miz Poole that she was also an opium user and a candidate for jail.

  From the door, Millicent Poole pointed one curled and yellow nail at me. “I curse you, girl! The church and all of False River curse you. In the name of the archangels, I brand you a minion from hell. You will crawl this earth on all fours because you are not worthy to stand. When you come of age, you will pay for what you have done.

  “That is,” she said, as Auntie’s hands went for her throat, “if you’re not dragged to hell before that.”

  Uncle got there first, and he rushed Miz Poole clean off her feet, bundled her out the door, and, with the sole of his Sunday shoe, booted her on down the road.

  My fear of going to prison was greater than all nations. As soon as the sheriff decided how guilty I was, he would come for me. He’d put me in chains and walk me along Potato Shed Road, while everyone crowded up at this end, nodding and saying, “I told you.”

  Inside, I would be strung by my thumbs, or hidden in a dark and moldy chamber in the earth. All the things I’d heard or conjured about Hell’s Farm rolled over me now—I’d eat bread with blue mold, and have nothing to drink. I’d be allowed no pencil, no paper. They’d work me mercilessly, slitting the throats of hogs in the boiling sun. I’d run out of tears, dry-sobbing and gagging, then scrub toilets with toothbrushes while they lashed my back, as they lashed everyone’s. I’d spend a hundred years cleaning up the blood.

  It finally came to me that I was an orphan, that Mama was no more. I had done something amazing. I had subtracted by one.

  Some nights, Auntie shuffled up to the attic with quilts and a pillow and made a place on the rag rug by my bed. When she rolled over, she grunted.

  “Auntie?” I said.

  “Close your eyes, baby girl. Get some sleep.”

  “You won’t let them take me away, will you?”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  But it was a false promise, and I was sorry I’d made her give it. She would not be able to stop them when they came.

  I lived in a fog, but I knew when officers of the law drove up and walked the burnt land. Uncle Cunny and his friend Ernie Shiloh told me, should I be questioned, to keep my mouth shut!

  My eyes were so dry and sore, I could hardly blink.

  One afternoon, when two firemen had dropped by, and while talk went on in low voices in the kitchen, Bitsy climbed to where I was hiding. I worried about her great bulk crashing through the attic floor. But she sat on the top step like the Great Wall of China, an immovable thing.

  Everybody visited the scene of the fire—and me—like we were tourist attractions. I wondered, when they locked me away, would Auntie walk down to the prison to see me on Sundays with a brown-paper package under her arm. I also wondered, now that Mama’s house was gone, where would the guards go for a fine, fine time?

  Auntie’d say, “Don’t mind, baby girl. It’ll all get better.”

  Sometimes, though, she’d looked me in the eye and read my thoughts.

  “Whatever you do,” she said, “don’t run away. I tried that, and I’ll tell you, it’s bad, real bad.”

  But I overheard Auntie say, “Cunny, I should have seen this coming. I think about takin’ that baby and getting out of here.”

  Uncle Cunny said, “Don’t—”

  “Only thing that stops me—”

  The silence was empty, like maybe Uncle had reached out and grabbed all the sound. Or maybe the words rushed back into Auntie’s mouth as fast as she said them.

  Maybe she’d never answered him at all.

  19

  Six months passed. Miss Pilcher came in spring, but Auntie took up a stick and ran her off. I went to school and back, and handed in papers, but I understood nothing. There were no thoughts left to attach myself to. I drifted inside a kind of cotton wool.

  Then, one night, Auntie came up two flights of stairs. The springs squeaked and groaned as she lay down and arranged herself beside me on the narrow bed. We pressed together and looked at the steepled beams of the roof.

  “Clea June,” she said, “you are twelve years old. You’re old enough to know about the chicken circus.”

  I smelled the starch in her cotton nightie.

  “It was truly a circus, and it looked so fine, posters up all over town. The outfit was owned by this big white man,” she said. “They pulled into the fairgrounds over in Greenfield. Our daddy took Shookie and me, and we bought tickets and candy floss. Oh, girl, how I loved it. My head was turned five ways from Sunday. There was a big striped tent on poles, and ringside seats that folded up, and they put on matinees in the afternoons. At night, they performed under colored lights.”

  I waited.

  “They had an elephant trainer, and a man on stilts. The fella who owned it was the ringmaster, too. Most of all, I loved the way those people lived, travelin’ in vans, pulling popcorn machines and midway games. They set up housekeeping behind the big top.”

  I found voice to ask, “Were there really trained chickens?”

  For a time she said nothing. Then, “There were. They were tiny little things billed as pygmy chickens. They wore pink ruffles and swung from a trapeze and walked tightropes, and twenty or thirty would pile up on the backs of fancy ponies. They had this little playground too, with a seesaw and a merry-go-round. After the show, people could come outside and watch.”

  I wiggled over on my side and put one arm across Auntie. She laid her big hand on my elbow. I could not think why she’d kept this such a secret. Or why she was choosing to tell me now.

  “They had these trailers they kept dark inside. They’d outfitted the walls with shelves for nesting hens. We called the shelves pans, a dozen setting hens bunched on a pan. Two, three hundred chickens in one trailer. Then we went in and took the eggs, kept them under hot lights, and hatched them out.”

  I pictured fuzzy yellow chicks. If they’d grown up to be pygmies, I couldn’t imagine how small the babies must have been. “And you taught them to do tricks?”

  She shook her head. “There was no such thing as a pygmy chicken, Clea. After a chick hatched, we bundled it tight in gauze strips to keep it from growing. We gave ’em just enough feed and water to stay alive.”

  I felt my eyes scrunch up at such cruelty to something so cute.

  “Sometimes, they grew knobby and deformed, and we kilt those right off. The rest lived and slept and shat in their bindings. We—we drugged ’em heavy to keep them from screaming.”

  “Chickens scream?” I said, my voice cracking.

  “They surely do.

  “When enough time passed, and we knew they wouldn’t grow no more, we unwrapped each one and cleaned it up. We were poor teachers, and the chickens were bad at learning. But we got paid for every one that performed and, in the end, if they wanted to eat, they had to do tricks—hens and roosters, ducks sometimes. If one died, we threw it out for the dogs.”

  I pressed my face to Auntie’s arm.

  “—And, my goodness, people loved those shows. Rich men came in big limousines, smoking fat cigars. Some gave us their whole paychecks to stay late, squattin’ by the pens, feeling for bones and plumpness under the feathers. That ringmaster did terrible things to those birds, squeezin’ the life out of them. Sometimes he fired ’em out of cannons. Lord, feathers and bones and bits went everywhere.

  “Folks wagered to see which ones would survive. The old man hired kids to clean up the mess
. Later, lots of folks came down with tuberculosis from handling those birds.”

  I snuggled closer, laid my temple on Auntie’s collarbone. I felt as though I’d fired that cannon myself.

  “But the birds were the least of it,” she said, sighing. “It was the 1960s and ’70s, and folks were really coming to see us Negroes.”

  I lifted my head to look, but her eyes were closed, her lashes bristly.

  “You see, times were changing in the South. Us colored was s’pose to be able to ride in the front of the bus. Eat at cafeterias and soda fountains. But there was so many white folks that held on to the old ways; they paid good money to see us pretend civil rights had never happened. And there we was, our eyelids painted glittery white, down in the circus ring, actin’ like field hands with a make-believe outhouse and buckets of slop, barefoot and wearing mammy bandanas. Like a hundred years had not gone by.”

  A white man had paid my auntie to do that. She was big and fierce, defiant and defensive. So protective had Auntie been of me in times of tribulation, it hardly seemed possible.

  “So we obliged. That’s what we was, Clea June, without an ounce of self-respect. Clown slaves to them customers, and to them damned chickens. It pains me to recall how some of us walked on our hands with those birds balanced up there on the soles of our feet.”

  “Did you do that? I mean, did you walk on your hands?”

  She snorted. “I could not. Sometimes I carried a microphone, though, flippin’ those birds like they was flapjacks in a skillet, bowin’ to ’em, sayin’ Yassuh, boss and No, ma’am, Miss Sally. I was ashamed, you see that?”

  “Yes.”

  “When a single black man carried on that way, it was like all of us disrespectin’ ourselves. This one fella, he had a shoe-shine box, and he went around polishing those chickens’ feet. That nearly kilt me, ’cause that’s what my daddy did. But those people in them seats kept on clappin’ and throwin’ quarters on the ground.”